Friendly rivals add to tapestry of Beautiful's Carole King story

Singer-songwriter Carole King's music would easily enough fill a musical, and there's plenty of it in the touring version of the Broadway show Beautiful -- The Carole King Musical.

Her story has inspired a show that focuses on the hit-makers of the late 1950s and early '60s, and also includes songs she wrote with her former husband and writing partner, Gerry Goffin, and also songs from another husband/wife songwriting duo, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.

Douglas McGrath wrote the book for the show, which made its Broadway debut in January 2014, becoming the highest grossing production in the history of the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. It won two Tony Awards and two Drama Desk Awards that year and a Grammy the next.

The national tour began in September 2015. Marc Bruni directs; Josh Prince is the choreographer.

"Doug [McGrath] interviewed all four of us, and he chose which songs to use that would help tell the story of Carole and Gerry, and since we were their best friends, we are in the story, too," Weil says in a joint phone interview with Mann, her husband of 56-plus years.

"There's a lot of humor in the show. The songs, in the context of how the show unfolds, tell how Carole and Gerry got married at a young age and how things came apart," she says. "So that when she sings 'It's Too Late,' which was on her huge hit album, Tapestry, you more fully understand what that song is all about.

"Carole and Gerry just couldn't stay married, but they wanted to remain friends, and when Gerry died, a few months after the show started on Broadway, Carole sang and played piano at his memorial service."

Weil and Mann say they are proud to have had a part in that era.

"Carole's the star of the show, obviously. We like to say that Carole and Gerry were like the Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez of our musical lives, and we were like the Fred and Ethel Mertz."

Those of us who read the fine print on our 45 RPM singles back in the 20th century became accustomed to seeing the names Goffin and King on some purchases and Mann and Weil on others. What we didn't know about was the behind-the-scenes maneuvering over which singers would record whose songs.

It was only years later that King began singing her own compositions, which provides a starting point -- King's solo "So Far Away" -- for the play, which then dissolves into flashbacks.

"The best example of how things worked then," Mann says, "was the time when music publisher Don Kirshner needed a new song for the girl group The Shirelles. So Carole and Gerry went in to pitch their song 'Will You Love Me Tomorrow,' and then we were pitching our song 'He's Sure the Boy I Love.'

"Well, Don picked Carole and Gerry's song, and it went to No. 1. Our song was a No. 11 hit for The Crystals three years later."

"But it was always a friendly rivalry," Weil says. "We were all inspired by rock 'n' roll and wanted to be part of all of that world. Elvis had been a big factor in what Barry was hoping to reach, and doo-wop also was part of what he was intrigued by. And Broadway and jazz were part of my background, so our tastes were quite varied."

The show includes a dozen songs by Goffin-King or King alone, including "It Might as Well Rain Until September," "Take Good Care of My Baby," "Some Kind of Wonderful," "Up on the Roof," "One Fine Day," "Chains," "Pleasant Valley Sunday," "The Locomotion," "It's Too Late," "You've Got a Friend," "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," "I Feel the Earth Move" and the title tune.

The show also includes half a dozen Mann-Weil compositions, some of which share songwriting credit with producer Phil Spector -- most notably "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," which Mann says he has never tired of recalling.

"It's done a lot for us," he says. "It was the most played song of the 20th century, according to BMI, and we were happy to be a part of what came to be called 'blue-eyed soul,' as it applied to The Righteous Brothers."

Other Mann-Weil songs in the show are "Walking in the Rain," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "Uptown" and "On Broadway."

The show even includes a "novelty" song, "Who Put the Bomp (in the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)" that Mann and Goffin wrote together, as a spoof of the doo-wop songs then hitting the charts. Mann sang it, and fans made it a No. 7 hit in 1961.

"We were trying to see how many songs we could write in half an hour," he says with a laugh, "and that one took us five minutes."

Style on 05/27/2018